Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: 1 Corinthians 6
Notes: Lord, that we would have the gentleness and courage to create a true Christian community that avoids worldly courts of law among ourselves, and lives pure lives. May we be authentic witnesses to your demands, but even stronger witnesses of your good news. Please give us the courage to not modify your gospel to suit the desires of our culture, yet have the wisdom to not pointlessly drive people away from you with sound bites and decisive speech. 

Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: John 4
Notes: Someone else planted. The Lord knows how to steer a conversation, even when another tries to derail it by throwing in bait for meaningless argument to avoid talking about where it hurts. The harvest fields are ready now.
Lord, I often feel like I am in a drought-ravaged land, where no one wants to talks about you. Please give me opportunities for witness. You have said that the fields are ready for harvest. Also, please guide my conversations, and give me your wisdom and your words, as well as your love.

Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: John 3
Notes: We are told that most people become Christians when they are children. Nicodemus ask, "...when he is old?" and Jesus answers, "it is possible...when one is born of the Spirit." And when it is God who is doing the work, what do we care about statistics?

Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: Ephesians 2
Notes: We sometimes struggle to associate with those far away from God. Yet, they are the ones the holy, pure, and perfect god LOVES, and they are the object of His grace.
Good works are not a nice-to. He has already prepared things for us to do - let's make sure we know what they are and actually do them!
We are one temple with the worst of sinners. Lord, please help us to love our fellow Christians and those who until now are still far off with your love.
Lord, please fill me with your love and help me keep my eyes peeled for the good works you have prepared for me to do today.

Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: Jeremiah 52
Notes: One has to wonder whether Zedekiah ever repented once he sat in a prison cell in Babylon, looking at his utter failure, never again able to see, haunted by the memories of the last days and hours he did see. Thank you, Lord, that we can come to you for forgiveness. Please help me seek your face regularly so I may not stray from your direction. May I also tell the story of your forgiveness to those who can't imagine it is available to them.

Today's Devotional Thought

Passage: Jeremiah 42 and 43
Notes: A people that is stricken with fear will gladly find an excuse why they do not need to obey God's directions. Once panicked, they will force others to join them. Like Jeremiah, we need to be careful nonetheless to faithfully proclaim God's message to them.

Why I Am Not Giving Up Facebook for Lent

As a minister, I'm in the people/relationships business. It may not be all I do, but it is a major part. Facebook is one of four major communications platforms for me (face-to-face, phone, and e-mail being the others). If I'm going to be salt and light, shutting off communication is not going to be my first step.

Do Not Judge, Lest You be Judged

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned."
Luke 6:37 NASB

Therefore, any judging is wrong and to be deplored. Right?

Then why might Jesus say,

"Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment."
John 7:18 NASB

Why does Paul tell the church in Corinth

"For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present."
1 Corinthians 5:3 NASB

If I am going to be a witness to others with the goal of them becoming part of the family of God, I will have to come to a conclusion whether I believe they are already Christians or not. Otherwise, I'd have to treat Billy Graham and Michael Newdow the same. Equally, if a church is going to practice the biblical mandate of Church discipline, it will be impossible to treat any action we didn't commit ourselves as morally neutral or beneficial.

We should heed what Jesus taught us in Luke 6, in particular what he says about mercy. Yet, building a nugget theology of "any judgment of what things are like at any time is to be deplored" will not make us more, but less obedient to Scripture. It'll merely make us pander to the Zeitgeist.

It Takes 100 Christians...

It takes 100 members of a congregation to win 1.67 people to Christ in a given year.

Greg Ogden (Transforming Discipleship, Location 325)

Re-Establishment of Relationship

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

2 Corinthians 5:17-19

The goal of the gospel is the re-establishment of relationship. Forgiveness from sin is the path to the goal.

Association with Non-Christians; Judging Others

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler - not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. 1 Corinthians 5:9-13

Random thought: as I re-read this, I couldn't help remembering the case of Ms. Kessmann, until yesterday leader of Germany's protestants, who resigned in the wake of a drunk driving episode. Lots of people were declaring that she alone could make her decision, or that she should not resign. "The drunkard"... "remove the wicked man." Maybe God does think this is a bigger deal than some people would like to believe.

Nonetheless, my real reason for posting this were the themes of, "don't rip [sinners] for acting like [sinners]" (anybody ever read 1 John 3?), and "quit judging others - that's God's job."

Lord, Save Us From the Knock-out Punches

How often have you received this e-mail?

Christian says...
Muslim says...
Christian says...
Muslim says...
Christian says...
Muslim says...
Christian delivers knock-out punch line...
Muslim has no response.

How I wish we could make these e-mails go away. First off, I doubt many of them ever happened. Maybe more importantly, things don't work that way. Do we really think that very many people will want to get to know the 'God who is love' when their experience with his followers is that of an intellectual argument - which in our e-mail, they lost?

And yet, we keep reading them and forwarding them with gusto. Trust me, if Jesus had e-mail, he'd hit 'delete.' He may click "unsubscribe," too.

Speaking the Truth Doesn't Matter

The goal of the gospel is not just the proclamation of truth. The goal of the gospel is life transformation through a relationship with God, a life that no longer is about you, but is lived for God's purposes.

Consequently, what matters is not to speak the truth only. For lives to be transformed, what matters is what other people hear (and what happens in response). We learned all the way back in speech communication that what a sender says is not automatically the same as what a recipient hears. The sender speaks from a set of experiences, uses a specific vocabulary, and speaks from a particular world view (I'm probably still missing some ingredients). The recipient will quite likely have a different vocabulary, very likely a different world view, and certainly a different set of experiences. That means that what I say is not automatically what you understand.

In addition to these differences, "noise" makes communication more difficult. Noise can be physical noise, such as other people talking, that causes me to misunderstand. Noise can be specific words that get me going, while you may mean a totally different thing.

If my wife comes into the kitchen on Saturday morning wearing a particular outfit, I may say, "Why did you wear that?" What I mean is, "I thought you were thinking about wearing that next Monday?" However, turns out that our son had a bad night, which I completely missed because I was quite tired and never woke up. She only slept about three hours and is completely exhausted, and a little flustered that I slept through it all. Not surprisingly, she has a headache, too. Does she hear "did you change your plans?" Possible, but not certain. She may just hear, "why do you have to wear that ugly thing?" Yes, this a fictive example.

I'll assume that we're agreed now that what one person says is not automatically understood in the same manner by another person. Let's assume I'm talking with another person about Jesus. He may actually be open to the gospel, though he also has some friends that are Buddhist, and whom he respects a lot. I start the conversation by pointing out the difference between a believer and an unbeliever. That's biblical language, isn't it? Turns out that today's society considers people of varying faiths all believers. My friend will quite possibly feel all his assumptions about narrow-minded, judgmental, we-have-the-truth Christians reinforced when I just put him, his Buddhist friend, and everyone else who doesn't think like me into the box, "unbelievers." It no longer matters what I say afterwards. The noise introduced through that unnecessary term just torpedoed whatever truth I may have to share.

That's why I examine what I say, what other people believe, and why I choose terms that express what I want to say without offending - inasmuch as I can. I am working on using the term non-Christian in the future. It expresses what I want to say just fine and avoids the unnecessary offense of "unbeliever."


So, yes, speaking the truth does matter ... if it is the first step. If it is the only step, it doesn't matter. Only if I speak the truth in such a manner that others hear the truth communicated in love, then speaking the truth matters. Speaking the truth so as to be understood must take the other into account, and must be done in sensitivity to the other.

Light of the World

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
Father James Keller

You are the light of the world.
Matthew 5:14

John 15:8

The point is not that it doesn't matter what fruit you produce.
The point is that unless you produce fruit, nothing else matters.

The Progress of the Lord's Kingdom

When we calmly reflect upon the fact that the progress of our Lord's Kingdom is dependent upon prayer, it is sad to think that we give so little time to the holy exercise. Everything depends upon prayer, and yet we neglect it not only to our own spiritual hurt, but also to the delay and injury of our Lord's cause upon earth.

E. M. Bounds

Church Growth is Inevitable in a Healthy Church

Rick Warren maintains in "The Purpose-Driven Church" that growth is something God gives, and that our best strategy is to become a "healthy" church - a people that live for His purposes. Then, growth will come because God sends it.

While probably not intended to back up Warren's thesis, Henry and Richard Blackaby (Henry being the author of "Experiencing God") write in "Spiritual Leadership" (p. 126):

Certainly church growth is inevitable in a healthy church, as the Book of Acts clearly exemplifies.

Should We Water Down the Gospel?

In a conversation yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned that we "don't want to water down the gospel." As I considered those words later, I realized that we probably never defined what we really mean by that. There are probably at least two things we may mean by it. The latter appears to me to be the biblical way of discipleship.


Scenario A: We water down by permanently removing portions of what believers (or potential members of the body of Christ) ought to receive. We never feed them any proteins, or not enough of the various vitamins to sustain them. In the process, they are malnourished because they lack a balanced, wholesome diet. In spiritual terms, this diet may be that we teach them they should be nice people, and think of God as a really great guy that is an example to follow. This "pandering to the consumer" may include the addition of foreign elements to encourage consumption. "We're overcooking the vegetables until the vitamins are gone and add sugar on top so they'll eat them."


Scenario B: When our son was a few months old, Ly started introducing him to "solid food" ("cereal" that looks more like powder). She mixed the cereal with plenty of baby formula (OK, so we're baby formula-ing things here). We never intended that he would not one day eat Jaegerschnitzel and Spaetzle. However, because his body was not yet able to handle meat, etc., we gave him what he could take in small portions, mixed with plenty of what his body is already comfortable with. If we didn't, his body would reject it (yup, spitting up or diarrhea). Note that watering down is not about changing or leaving out, but about providing smaller amounts of the real thing in a manner that will actually be digested rather than rejected, and delaying other things (e.g., honey) until the baby will not be in such great danger of developing allergies. The aim is that we learn to eat the real thing. Instead of saying "Great is Thy faithfulness" which may be obscure to the audience, and therefore be blended out as they listen, we may say "God, you do exactly what you said you would do, and we can trust you to take care of us." If the well-tried line is going to be lost on them, and the latter wording will bring the concept across, is the latter maybe the right "watered-down" version that will start them growing until one day they can grasp the whole range of meaning of "God's faithfulness" - using that term or not?


As you will have guessed, it seems to me that we probably should water down the gospel. However, since the term has such a bad rap, we're going to waste a lot of energy and spend a lot of time explaining it if we actually call it what it is.


1 Cor 3:2 - I had to feed you with milk, not with solid food, because you weren't ready for anything stronger. (NLT)